Women Shouldn't Run Wall Street: Why a Role Reversal Won't Work

This week’s New York magazine includes a piece called What If Women Ran Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar, analyzing testosterone’s effects on the male-dominated world of trading. It’s not an altogether new point. Our own Mary Carmichael talked about it a couple of years ago. And economists at Davos last year argued that the presence of more women on Wall Street might have averted the banking crisis. "Women are more cautious," Muhammad Yunus, the head of Grameen Bank, said at the time. "They wouldn't have taken the enormous types of risks that brought the system down."

This Mullah Omar Show’

A thrill coursed through the Taliban’s ranks a few weeks ago—someone was said to have seen a new video that showed Mullah Mohammed Omar in the distance, firing a Kalashnikov. The insurgents rejoiced: they hadn’t heard from their reclusive leader since late 2001, when he rode east into the Kandahar mountains on the back of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle, fleeing a storm of U.S. bombs.

The excitement, however, quickly evaporated. No one recalls how many times Mullah Omar has supposedly reappeared over the past nine years, but it always ends the same way: the rumored new video, signed communiqué, or audiotape turns out to have been a fantasy spawned by careless talk and fervently wishful thinking. Then the nagging questions start again: Where is Mullah Omar? Is he alive? Is he in charge? And if not, then who is?

A clear answer to those questions would very likely decide whether the Afghan insurgency stands or falls. Everyone agrees that absolute loyalty to Mullah Omar is what holds the Taliban together. Practically to a man, the group’s commanders and fighters say they’re fighting for the village cleric they call the Amir-ul-Momineen—the “commander of the faithful”—and for the restoration of his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. “Every Taliban knows that the morale and unity of the insurgency depend on Mullah Omar,” says a senior Taliban intelligence officer, asking not to be named for security reasons. “We are all fighting for him.” Without their faith in Mullah Omar’s divinely inspired leadership, the Taliban would almost surely collapse into a welter of rival clans and factions.

Those splits are more visible now, as the doubts and divides grow with every false report. Nearly a dozen Taliban commanders who were interviewed by NEWSWEEK for this story say Omar’s silence has become an urgent topic among the Taliban leadership. Most of their rank-and-file fighters remain convinced that Omar is alive, in charge, and guiding the insurgency, they say. But that’s partly because the commanders themselves keep the legend alive and partly because any suggestion in the ranks that Omar is dead, or not in control, might brand the speaker as a nonbeliever, perhaps even a spy. “Asking about Mullah Omar’s whereabouts raises suspicions and is prohibited,” says the senior Taliban intelligence officer. In private conversations, however, that’s just what top commanders are doing.

Dan Rostenkowski: Classic Chicago Pol and Bipartisan Figure

Though he was a Democrat through and through, nobody worked and played better with Republicans than Rosty. He was first elected to Congress in 1958, and by the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, had risen to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax-writing powerhouse that would first smooth the way for Reagan’s tax cuts and then, in 1986, in Reagan’s second term, enact major tax reform.

Rosty’s support was critical, giving Reagan’s program momentum in the Democratic-controlled House and assuring voters that this wasn’t a giveaway to the rich and that middle America would benefit, too. He supported Reagan’s reduced tax rates on individuals and corporations, and in his televised Democratic response to the president’s call for reform, told voters to write him in Washington to show their support. “Just address it to R-O-S-T-Y,” he said, and the tens of thousands of letters that flowed to his office made him a hero and Reagan’s tax reform a reality.

As chairman of Ways and Means, Rosty accumulated an impressive list of legislative credits. He helped save Social Security from insolvency and quietly worked with Reagan lieutenants, and then George H.W. Bush, to plug some of the fiscal holes that Reagan’s tax policies had created. He was at the peak of his power when he ushered through the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, which offered an array of new and expanded benefits to senior citizens, including federal funding for prescription drugs.

He thought seniors would be grateful for greater health security in exchange for a relatively modest surcharge on their Medicare bill. Instead they were incensed at the notion of paying more money to the government, and at a town-hall meeting in 1989 in his Illinois district, Rosty’s constituents rebelled, waving protest signs at him, calling for his impeachment, and finally chasing him out of the room and down the street until he was able to take refuge in his car. Then they pounded on his car, some using their crutches, a scene so graphic and memorable that three months later, Congress repealed the program.

The experience no doubt made Rostenkowski wary of his next brush with health-care reform, which was with the Clintons. He was notably unhelpful to the first lady in her efforts to craft legislation, and complained that her health adviser, Ira Magaziner, a Yale Law School classmate of the Clintons, was out of touch with working-class American and that there was no one in the White House “who had dirt under their fingernails.”

Rosty was the epitome of what people think of when they imagine a Chicago pol. He was gruff and profane and didn’t think much of what he called "women’s lib." There weren’t that many women in top positions during Rosty’s heyday. “Who invited Pocahontas?” he famously asked when a long-haired woman he didn’t know but who was a senior congressional staffer left the room after attending a meeting. At least he didn’t say it in front of her.

Rosty’s identification with working-class aspirations remained strong even as he gravitated to the attributes of power. He liked to hold forth at Morton’s steakhouse in Georgetown, where he would down scotches in “Rosty’s Rotunda,” a booth that was set aside for him and his lobbyist buddies, along with some journalists.

The Misinformants

Here is the latest semantic assault from the party that brought you “Islamo-facism” (circa 2005) and “Axis of Evil” (2002). The term “stealth jihad” is suddenly voguish among politically ambitious right wingers who see President Obama’s approach to terrorism as insufficient. If it sounds like a phrase from a military-fantasy summer blockbuster, that’s on purpose: in its cartoonish bad-guy foreignness, “stealth jihad” attempts to make the terrorist threat broader and thus more nefarious than it already is. The only thing scarier than an invisible, homicidal, suicidal enemy with a taste for world domination is one who’s sneaking up on you. In the words of former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich at a July speech at the American Enterprise Institute, “stealth jihad” is an effort “to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.”
The term wasn’t Gingrich’s invention. It’s the title of a two-year-old book by Robert Spencer, whose hyperventilating antiterror blog, Jihad Watch, is cited and circulated widely on the far right. But the recent vicious debate over the proposed community center and mosque near Ground Zero gives Gingrich an excuse to use “stealth jihad” and its variants frequently—not just at the AEI but in an interview with this magazine. (In an essay on the conservative Web site Human Events, he referred instead to “creeping sharia.”) Gingrich’s like-minded peers have seized on the language, too. “Muslim Brotherhood operatives, like [Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the center’s founder and leader] are extremely skilled at obscuring … their true agenda,” said Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, on FOX’s Glenn Beck show. “It’s part of the stealth jihad.”

We Need to Be Innovating Every Day’

Amway China’s chairwoman, Eva Cheng, started at the company as a secretary in the Hong Kong office in 1977 and now oversees the company’s operations in Greater China and Southeast Asia, which was reportedly responsible for more than one third of its $8.4 billion in 2009 revenue. A decade ago direct marketing was banned in China for seven years, severely affecting Amway’s ability to operate in the country. NEWSWEEK’s Isaac Stone Fish talked to Cheng about the business climate in China today, the best way to deal with Beijing, and the role of women in China’s corporate culture. Excerpts:

There’s been a lot of press lately about China not being an easy place to work for foreign companies. How does Amway feel about the current business climate in China?

Even though it’s modern, dynamic, very developed in many respects, China as a whole is still a developing country; it has never really been a very easy place to do business.

‘Confidence in the Economy Is Driven by the Woman’

Economists trying to map the global economic recovery tend to focus on demography. The key players at the moment, says former Indonesian finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, are women, who may hold the most potential for jump-starting global growth. Indrawati, now managing director of the World Bank, sat down with NEWSWEEK’s Daniel Stone in Washington to talk about the role of women as key drivers of the recovery. Excerpts:

How do you view the role of women in global development?

So much research has been done showing that the woman is the most vulnerable but also the biggest strength leading to economic progress. This crisis alone is going to create an additional 50 [million] to 60 million poor people, which if you combine with the [global] target to reduce poverty by half by 2015, the woman alone is going to be a huge driver for many countries.

Because of their role within families?

Usually when you target [government money] for women, they’re really going to use it for their children. In much of my experience, the males, when they receive government money, buy something that mostly serves their own interests. This is very generally known by many development experts as well as policymakers.

David Paterson’s Dilemma

Black solidarity no longer trumps all.

Gus Savage is not someone who normally springs to my mind. The onetime Chicago congressman lost his seat in 1992 and quickly vanished from the national scene. But as scandal threatens to consume New York Gov. David Paterson, I find myself reflecting on Savage.
Not that Savage has much in common with Paterson. The New York governor is a charming, self-deprecating baby boomer, while Savage, born in 1925, was a raging loose cannon who excelled at the politics of racial polarization. When a young Peace Corps volunteer in then-Zaire accused Savage of fondling her and demanding sex in 1989 (a claim subsequently sustained by the House ethics committee), he denounced the woman as a traitor to the black community. He also attacked the "racist" news media for airing the allegation. In fact, whenever challenged or under attack, Savage blamed racism. The act played well enough in his South Side district that, despite a record of meager accomplishment, his constituents rallied around him time and again. For they were loath to see a strong black man brought low. He won six straight terms, beginning in 1980, and finally lost to Mel Reynolds, a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar seen as the face of the future.
Paterson, of course, is not accused of sexually harassing anyone. He is alleged to have gone out of his way (and perhaps abused his authority in the process) to protect an aide who, some say, had a habit of manhandling women he was involved with. In another age—in Savage's age—black notables would have automatically rallied around Paterson. They would have dismissed the allegations as nothing more than propaganda from a racist establishment intent on bringing a powerful black man to his knees. That has not happened for several reasons, one being that even those who once considered themselves Paterson's intimates are not sure what to make of the situation. Given the pattern of ever more damning revelations, they are not convinced that he has been totally straight with them—and are unwilling to put themselves on the line for fear his actions may turn out to be worse than he has let on.